Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
For two weeks, Lorraine stayed away. Sophie stopped checking the driveway when she turned onto their street and booked the lake hotel after Jesse confirmed he could take five days.
The room had a balcony; she called to ask whether they could have breakfast out there even in November, and the woman said there were blankets in the wardrobe.
He brought home flowers that evening. They were loose stems from the grocery store, wrapped in damp paper, and Sophie put them in a chipped blue jug because all the good vases still held dried wedding flowers she couldn’t bring herself to throw away.
“What’s the occasion?” Sophie cut a stem over the sink.
“I saw them,” Jesse said. “You like those.”
She did. She turned toward him with the scissors still in her hand, and he kissed her carefully before moving them aside. They ate dinner on the back steps in sweaters, passing a beer between them while the sky darkened over the fence.
Sophie told him about the proposal she had been writing after work.
She wanted to turn the unused east gallery into a room where schoolchildren could handle materials and make things, with transport paid for by sponsors so the schools could actually come.
Her director preferred another space for private receptions.
Sophie had spent six years arranging evenings for people who already belonged there, and she wanted this room badly enough that she had begun rehearsing arguments in the car.
“Show me,” he said. He leaned his shoulder against hers. “You’ve drawn something, haven’t you?”
“On the laptop.” She watched him reach through the open door. “If they say yes, it means some late nights.”
“Then we’ll eat late,” he said. He took the empty bottle from her hand. “Or I’ll cook.”
“You’ll say that until I bring home the glue,” Sophie said. She opened the folder she’d been carrying around for three days. “I need you to look at something, actually. Tell me if these tables will fit through the loading door.”
He studied the measurements, then asked where she’d found the money for six tables. Sophie said she hadn’t found all of it yet and tried to turn the page before he could ask how much she’d already spent.
“How much, Soph?” He held the corner of the paper down. “Your money?”
“Samples,” she said. She took the page from under his finger. “Paint. A couple of things I couldn’t ask a school to buy before I knew whether they worked.”
He waited until she told him the amount. Then he pushed the papers toward her and said she should put in a claim, and she snapped that she knew how her job worked. They finished their beer without looking at the drawings again. Later she left them on his side of the bed.
In the morning he’d circled two table sizes that would fit. Sophie found him fastening his boots and kissed the back of his neck. He caught her before she could move away, pulled her down onto his knee, and complained that she smelled of the coffee she’d promised to make him.
On Saturday they repaired the fence. Sophie held a level while Jesse fixed the leaning section, and they argued cheerfully about whether the old boards could be saved. By noon she had mud on her jeans, a splinter in her finger, and a growing certainty that they had come through the worst of it.
Jesse took the splinter out at the kitchen table. He bent over her hand with tweezers, his brows drawn together, and she watched the concentration in his face with a tenderness that made her throat ache.
“You make that face at electrical panels,” she said. She rested her other hand on his knee.
“Electrical panels don’t pull away,” he said. He caught the splinter and held it up. “There.”
She kissed him before he could put the tweezers down.
He laughed against her mouth, then stopped laughing when she moved closer, and the unfinished fence remained outside while he lifted her onto the table.
Later she found mud on the kitchen chair and wiped it off with a smile she couldn’t quite suppress.
That evening they went to the opening of a restaurant where Jesse’s first apprentice had done the lighting.
Sophie had been looking forward to wearing old pajamas and eating something in front of the television, but Jesse had put the invitation beside the kettle three days earlier and asked twice whether she’d remembered.
She washed the mud off her legs and took the navy dress from the back of the wardrobe.
He was waiting downstairs in a shirt she hadn’t seen him iron. When she came down, he leaned back against the wall and watched her finish fastening her bracelet.
“I thought you were wearing jeans,” he said. He caught the end of the bracelet while she tried to reach the clasp. “I could’ve been wearing jeans.”
“You still could.” Sophie turned her wrist for him. “Go on. I’ll wait.”
He fastened it and kissed the inside of her wrist. She drew her hand back slowly, enjoying the way his attention followed it, then picked up the flat shoes she’d need to walk home.
The restaurant had been a hardware shop.
Sophie remembered bins of loose screws beside the door and a man who always seemed annoyed when she wanted fewer than twenty; now there was a bar beneath the long front window, and warm light fell over tables that had been pushed together for the opening.
Jesse stopped just inside, examining the fixtures above the bar until someone came up behind him and slapped his shoulder.
“You can say hello before you find something wrong,” the younger man said. He had a baby asleep against his chest in a sling, one small fist pushed beneath his collar. “Sophie’s going to think you taught me badly.”
Jesse introduced him as Ben, although Sophie remembered him from the workshop. He’d been a skinny boy with terrible spots who’d once wired their shed, then come back the next day because he was certain he’d left a screwdriver in the wall.
“Did you ever find it?” she asked. She had forgotten the tool until she saw his face.
“In my lunch bag.” Ben grinned and adjusted the sling. “Please don’t tell anyone here. I’ve only just persuaded them to pay me.”
His partner came over carrying two glasses and handed one to Sophie.
Ben tried to take the other, but she kept it and said he’d already had hers while she went to the bathroom.
They began arguing quietly about whose turn it was to hold the baby, and Jesse took Sophie’s coat before it slipped from her arm.
She watched him talking to Ben beside the bar.
He let the younger man finish explaining a problem with the ceiling before asking a question, then listened again while Ben pointed upward.
The restaurant owner joined them, and Sophie saw Jesse put a hand on Ben’s shoulder and move him forward to answer.
“He thinks the world of him,” Ben’s partner said. She tipped her head toward the two men. “We had a hell of a time when he started on his own. Jesse came round with a box of things he said he didn’t need anymore. I don’t think he’d opened half of them.”
“He keeps everything,” Sophie said. She could picture the shelves of spare parts that left no room for her bicycle. “You should’ve asked for the rest.”
The baby woke while they were speaking. His mother put down her glass, took him from Ben, and told Sophie she was going to find somewhere to feed him before the music got louder. Sophie watched her go toward the back room, where a woman had already begun clearing coats from a chair.
Jesse brought Sophie a plate with three things on it and pointed out the one she couldn’t eat. She asked why he’d brought it, and he took it off the plate and put it in his mouth before answering.
“Because I can,” he said. He rested a hand at her waist. “Ben wants to show you the old fittings he kept. He thinks the museum might want them.”
“Does everybody think I collect their junk?” Sophie asked. She ate the smallest thing on the plate, found she liked it, and reached for the other before he could take that too.
“You took the sign from the barbershop.” Jesse bent to hear her over a burst of music. “It’s still in our garage.”
“That’s for an exhibition.” She could see that he was enjoying himself. “Eventually. When I find somebody interested in paying for it.”
He laughed and let her take him to meet the owner.
Sophie asked about the building’s old cupboards, which had come from a drugstore even earlier than the hardware business, and Jesse wandered away while she was still talking.
She watched him find Ben’s partner by the back doorway and bring her the plate she’d left untouched on the bar.
The owner brought out the hardware shop’s old sign after she asked about the cupboards. It was longer than she remembered, the painted letters flaking along the bottom where somebody had once tried to clean it. He wanted to sand it and hang it above the new bar.
“Could you wait?” Sophie asked. She put her glass on the counter. “Let me ask someone to come and look at it first.”
“It’s been in my cellar for a year,” he said. He sounded amused by her concern. “Another week won’t hurt.”
Sophie asked permission to photograph both sides.
There was a name on the back beneath a row of old nail holes, and she recognized the surname from a box of local photographs that nobody at the museum had found time to identify.
She had spent a wet afternoon with that box last winter, choosing faces she wished she knew anything about.
“I might have a picture of the shop,” she told him. Jesse came over while she was describing it, and stayed beside her until the owner asked whether he knew how much the sign weighed.
“Don’t look at me,” Jesse said. He put a hand on Sophie’s shoulder. “She’ll have it in the truck before you’ve agreed to anything.”
“I haven’t asked for it.” Sophie looked back at the owner. “A loan would be useful, though.” She was already thinking of where they could put it, where the light wouldn’t fall straight on the paint.